Is language an extraterrestrial virus?

Can you speak on that, on that aspect of the linguistic constraints, the language being a sort of extraterrestrial virus, parasite? Yeah, that’s something he’s very famous for saying, that language is an alien virus, or language is a virus from outer space. And Burroughs is influenced by a lot of people in this regard. One person he was influenced by was the Count Korzybski, who was a Polish, American Polish intellectual, early 20th century, who had a lot of ideas about language and how the language that we grow up with restricts our thinking, and restricts what is possible for us to conceive of.

And so he was very influenced by this. But Burroughs takes this to an entirely different level, in the sense that he believes that language as a disembodied entity, the information itself is actually a type of life form. And it’s a type of life form which has constructed your body, your mortal body, your very fragile, temporary body. It constructs your body to live inside of it, to achieve its own form of immortality. Right? So your mortality, your death is sustaining another information life form who doesn’t have to die because you die for it, right? And this has gone over in a little bit more detail in a text he wrote called Apuuk is here, and he gets a little bit more explicit about it.

Although it’s still extraordinarily difficult to understand as Burroughs explains it. Even at his most explicit, he’s still a little dense. And how do you spell that? You said Apuuk is here? Apuuk. A-H-P-O-O-K. Apuuk is here. And Apuuk is one of the Mayan gods of death. So, but one of the things that’s so interesting, I think, about Burroughs and about cut up writing in particular, this writing style he developed where he was cutting up particular texts and rearranging these elements in order to look for sentences that he likes, which would then, once he gets these new sentences, these scrambled sort of sentences, he would then look in his environment for synchronicities to see if they come true.

But he’s also using this type of writing to produce altered states of consciousness. He wrote in a letter to Timothy Leary one time. Him and Leary knew each other a little bit. And he was, he, Burroughs turns his back on psychedelic drugs in 1961. He starts, he has an intense period of experimentation with psychedelics, which, you know, lasts from the late 50s all the way through 1961. But in 1961, he just starts having bad trips over and over again. He can’t have an enjoyable psychedelic experience anymore. So he’s convinced that psychedelics is a tool for demonic entities or archons to take advantage of us.

And so he writes a letter to Timothy Leary trying to convince Leary that drugs are not the way and that you can get high just by reading, right? But reading cut up writing specifically. And I think it’s interesting because when you get into some of these passages from his most, let’s say, his most unusual or most courageous kind of works, such as The Soft Machine, and you’re reading this type of experimental cut up writing for long periods of time, you know, 5, 10, 15 pages straight of cut up writing, you do enter a different mode of thinking and your reading becomes very passive and you end up slipping into this passive reading and reading several pages that aren’t really registering consciously.

You’re going to this unconscious or trance-like mode and then you’ll snap back into a real scene that actually has a regular narrative structure. And it’s like jumping around in time as though it’s a dream. And so for him, it was also not just a way to aesthetically represent what dreaming and consciousness is like, but to allow the reader to enter particular trance states for a variety of reasons. So one reason why you might want the reader to enter a trance stage is to sort of break down the cultural and linguistic programming, which is restricting their thinking in the first place.

But there’s also ritual elements involved, most particularly ritual elements of violence. So in the 1968 version of The Soft Machine, which was published in the UK, which is kind of hard to find out. I don’t think they’ve done a reprinting of it in a very long time. You begin reading several pages of cut up writing and then you’re snapped back into a scene of a man in a hotel room in Morocco, which is actually this hotel room that the guy is in is actually based on a real place in Morocco that Burroughs lived in that he thought a demonic entity was haunting.

And then a demon appears in this guy’s hotel room and he attacks it, he attempts to kill it. And so there’s this incredibly complex picture going on where the book is forcing the reader into a trance state and then dropping them off in this basically real location where this fictional battle with a demon takes place. And what Burroughs believes is probably a real demon that exists there. So he’s using literature to transport his intentions through time and space to this place and to commit violence against this intermediary being. Whoa. So you said a lot there, Tommy, you’re you’re the language alien virus information as a sort of life form that uses you as a vessel.

You die off for it and the information continues to live. Wow. And yeah, and that’s why it’s when you are reading cut up, it is a lot of times and I’m sure people can relate and think about this, the powers that be. They don’t want you writing anymore. Actual writing, you know, writing actual and well, obviously this is an electronic version. I use a remarkable, but you get what I’m saying. They want you typing. So you’re disconnected because my retention at least for me goes up drastically when I’m handwriting notes. Obviously it’s not a due to time constraints.

It’s not a good choice, but it is something more personable about journaling. You have young also talking about journaling your dreams and all these different things. So the art form of writing itself and then reading. People don’t really read anymore nowadays. And we literally have all the literature that we could possibly want at the at our fingertips at any point in time. And so getting high from reading, that’s such an interesting concept. I never understood it. And a lot of times when you’re reading a book where your mind starts to wander and it might not wander on something, you know, esoteric or metaphysical.

But it might wander by like, did I send that email and you’re still reading or even when you’re doing an audio book, your mind will wander. You’re not paying attention to the words that are being said. And this can apply to anything, to a movie, to whatever, to a conversation. Your mind will start to wander and you find yourself, you know, when you’re reading, oh, let me reread that again because I wasn’t paying attention. You know, as you’re actively reading, so you go back, but the cut up method is so distracting. And I’m a Kanye West fan, right? We know Kanye West hasn’t had the most, the best reputation recently, but there was a song that I always wondered why this part was in it.

Because again, these artsy types, you’re like, this is what people look up to. This is one of the masterminds and that one song, Lift Yourself, that came out in 2018, where at the end, it was Poopty Scoop, Scoopty Whoop, Whoopty Scoopty Poop, Poopty Scoopty. And it goes on and on in this weird Joyce-ian kind of thing. And now it’s making sense. What if Kanye was sort of tapping into this more Joyce-ian than anything? Because when you read Joyce, James Joyce, it’s like, it’s like gloss layer. Like, what do you, what? Like, it’s, it’s about this idea.

Maybe, I don’t know if they were, I’m sure that they were doing it on purpose, but there was this one quote that I read, I think it was Terrence McKenna, where they talked about how James Joyce said, if humanity was to end, I want this book, and I think it was either Finnegan’s Wake or the other one. I want this book to be what they use to, if they, you know, if people find this in the rubble that is, that is left over, it’s the only thing that they find. I want them to rebuild humanity from all the letters in this.

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